History

It began over 75 years ago.

In the shorthand of newspaper headlines, the Citizens Housing Council was created to fight slums; in the longhand of history it turned out to be much more than that. CHC became a resource for the city for all housing and urban development issues. It was a unique creation, a pro bono organization composed of distinguished professionals who combined technical expertise, political savvy and social conscience.

The guiding force behind Citizens Housing Council (Planning was added to our name in 1948) was Harold S. Buttenheim, the editor and publisher of the American City, an immensely successful municipal affairs magazine. Buttenheim believed that the only way the city could address or solve its housing problems was through a broad coalition of public and private interests. To create that coalition, he called upon experts and professionals who knew how to get things done, and were committed to the city. He asked architects and real estate executives, union leaders, bankers, social activist, lawyers and academics to join the fledgling organization.

Citizens Housing’s first and highly successful effort was to press for a state constitutional amendment to enable the State of New York to become actively involved in facilitating low income housing production. The change authorized the state to borrow funds and to make loans and grants to local housing authorities for public housing and the clearance, planning and reconstruction of substandard areas. New York became the first state to provide funds to clear the slums and replace them with public housing.

Since then, we have been at the forefront of all major developments in housing and planning policy in New York City the 20th and 21st century.

We are always evolving to make sure our work is relevant and ahead of the curve. But we remain true to our origins. We are a Council of leading professionals from every industry that shapes the residential built environment. We share the conviction that by working together we can promote solutions for the long-term progress of the city.

The New York City planning and development world received a jolt of energy in Feburary, when Mayor Bill de Blasio delivered his State of the City address. He announced his intention to redevelop the Sunnyside railyard in western Queens, a 200-acre site, with housing and neighborhood amenities. This announcement quickly met some doubt both from Albany and from various pundits around the city. A complicated mix of layout, soil composition, and land ownership issues will combine to make Sunnyside a difficult project.

But Sunnyside will not be the first place in the city where existing railroad infrastructure makes …

CHPC remembers the late former Governor Mario Cuomo as a true servant of the public. To that end we delved into our archives to uncover the work that propelled him into public life.

In the late 1960s, Cuomo, a lawyer from Queens, became involved with a group of Corona residents who resisted a city proposal that would have displaced them in order to build a high school. From that experience, Cuomo was asked by Mayor John Lindsay to analyze the turmoil that resulted from a subsequent proposal to build low-income housing alongside the Long Island …

This week brought news that the two government housing giants, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, would begin contributing to a fund dedicated to affordable housing. As Bloomberg reports, this pot of money, known as the National Affordable Housing Trust Fund, has existed since Congress created it in 2008—but has lain empty ever since.

Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Mel Watt announced that the financial condition of Fannie and Freddie, which kept them from contributing, has improved. The decision to start contributing to the fund has been welcomed and panned by Democrat and Republican elected …

In October, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a “Community Parks Initiative” that recognizes the importance of the parks beyond Central Park or Prospect Park, where a couple basketball or handball courts serve as community magnets. The first phase of the plan, dubbed NYC Parks: Framework for an Equitable Future, will invest $130 million in capital funds to refurbish existing parks around the city. The plan has come in for criticism that it doesn’t go far enough.

In the 1980’s housing in New York City was, in many ways, sick. Tens of thousands of units had been abandoned, New York City was still near the brink of bankruptcy and the federal government was backing away from its historical commitment to housing. HPD was a relatively new agency at the time and it had few tools in its toolbox to tackle the huge housing problems it faced. The agency, however, had a philosophical underpinning that healthy buildings made healthy neighborhoods and its staff had the creativity to experiment with new ideas. If tenants …

On May 3 Mayor Bill de Blasio announced his ten-year Housing New York plan. It follows in the tradition of the housing plans that preceded it: broad in scope, ambitious in goals. Indeed, in her keynote speech at CHPC’s annual luncheon the prior week, Deputy Mayor Alicia Glen drew on the great housing reforms of New York City’s going back to the early 20th Century.

With that historical perspective in mind, we dive into our archives to find the 1985 State of the City speech in which Mayor Ed Koch announced his own housing initiatives. It was the first …

Our archives contain original copies of over one dozen slum clearance plans proposed in the 1950’s by the Committee on Slum Clearance Plans, whose Chairman was Robert Moses. These plans were proposed following the passage of the National Housing Act of 1949, which provided that areas with “slum conditions” could be seized, cleared and made available to private parties for redevelopment. Cleared land could be sold at a loss to induce developers to redevelop the sites, with the federal government taking two-thirds of the loss and local government one-third.

On the eve of the New York City Rent Guidelines Board’s first meeting of 2014, Mayor Bill de Blasio filled some of its vacant seats by appointing public, owner, and tenant-advocate members. These appointments have caught much press attention lately on the heels of de Blasio’s rent-freeze campaign rhetoric. His appointments to the RGB offer a glimpse into whether a rent freeze will, in fact, happen.

As the public and private debates continue, CHPC has dug into its archives to find primary documents cataloging the development of rent regulation in New York City. The archives contain a great …